An application of nonlinear feature extraction – a case study for low speed slewing bearing condition monitoring and prognosis

This paper presents the application of four nonlinear methods of feature extraction in slewing bearing condition monitoring and prognosis: these are largest Lyapunov exponent, fractal dimension, correlation dimension, and approximate entropy methods. Although correlation dimension and approximate entropy methods have been used previously, the largest Lyapunov exponent and fractal dimension methods have not been used in vibration condition monitoring to date. The vibration data of the laboratory slewing bearing test-rig run at 1 rpm was acquired daily from February to August 2007 (138 days). As time progressed, a more accurate observation of the alteration of bearing condition from normal to faulty was obtained using nonlinear features extraction. These findings suggest that these methods provide superior descriptive information about bearing condition than time-domain features extraction, such as root mean square (RMS), variance, skewness and kurtosis.